MSI Z77A-G45 GAMING Motherboard Review

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MSI Z77A-G45 GAMING Motherboard UEFI

In this section we will take a brief look at the UEFI ClickBios II. The outer shell remains the same throughout and the center pane handles the data. I found that MSI’s ClickBios II keeps many aspects of a legacy BIOS (mainly text based) with a snazzy interface that takes up more room than it needs to. The center pane deserves more room.

This is the landing screen of the MSI Z77A-G45 Gaming Motherboard UEFI. Information pertaining to CPU and RAM is immediately available without having to find your way to the hardware monitor, and three large icons below that allow you to quickly and easily select different operation modes. A lot of effort has gone into making the UI look good which really adds to the overall user experience.

ClickBios II works much the same as legacy BIOS with the added bonus of being able to use your mouse. There are no magic sliders to modify CPU speed or memory frequency, it is all still heavily text based which I found it very easy to use.

The large icons on the left and right make for speedy transitions between configuration modes. If you are more familiar with a legacy BIOS you will easily navigate around this UEFI. MSI allow for a lot of user configurable values in the overclocking settings, but you will need to know what you are doing as the ‘HELP’ prompts can be very vague.

Scrolling down in the OC settings pane reveals yet more user configurable values.

The ECO section of the UEFI gives you settings that pertain to energy saving. Each setting is covered in detail in the user guide. It’s nice to see that higher end motherboards need not be the power hungry monsters they used to be.

In the utilities section you have option to back up your hard drives and update your BIOS ROM. I have never been a fan of live update (like installing a BIOS in windows) for the simple fact that so many things could potentially go wrong. Live update has the advantage that it will find the latest BIOS file for you, but it’s not as if that’s really a hard task. Best bet for me it to stick to simple methods where I have control.

Standard and new features are found in the security section of the UEFI. The most notable feature for me is ‘U-Key’ which allows you to create a physical level of security via a USB key. If this feature is enabled and the USB key is not present, then the motherboard will not boot.